armlessbear.com

We had an interesting Thanksgiving and I learned many lessons.
1)Never, EVER taste the brine, not even by accident and certainly not on purpose.
2)Do not tempt fate
3)Turkey roasters make blonde turkeys.

The brine worked very well and we were able to make juicy turkeys, but the road to the dinner table was a long, dark journey…
We hit Sentry to pickup some additional last-minute items and arrived at home around 11:30am. We started to prepare the birds and get them ready for the roasters. In a short amount of time we got them stuffed with aromatics (garlic, celery, cinnamon stick, carrots, poultry herbs, onions and apples) and put into the heating roasting pans.
S. commented that we hadn’t blown a fuse yet with both turkey roasters running. I chastised him for tempting fate with such a comment… Something like that could only curse our turkey roasting.
Later my mother tried to plug in the giant coffee pot to make her mulled cider. The plug didn’t work. None of the kitchen plugs worked. The light on the porch was out which meant the roasters were out.
We reset the circuit and plugged a roaster into the garage circuit and then plugged in the coffee pot for the cider mulling. Things seemed to be going swimmingly until…
the entire house went down and the UPSs we have kept beeping incessantly. ARGH! We ran around turning lights off and unplugging everything we didn’t need plugged in. We tried to reset the house, but no dice. Luke fixed the problem by resetting each of the circuits and finally we had power. Mike and I took a turkey over to Amy’s where we could continue roasting without fear of losing power again.
Amy mocked our blonde (but nearly fully cooked) turkeys.
We heated her oven up to 500 (as proscribed by St. Alton) and put the turkey in and set all the smoke alarms off in her house by burning delicious turkey juices to the pan. 15 minutes later I took out a much darker turkey and took it home to “rest”. Both turkeys were nearly cooked and we were nowhere near our 4pm eating time. Potatoes were not cooked, cider was not mulled, and table was not set. Nothing was ready and we just hoped the power stayed on.

Then our attention was called to our sink not draining and garbage disposal not functioning properly. My mother had put all the potato peels down the disposal and clogged it up.
Mike and I tried plunging with 2 varieties of plunger, but to no avail. We called Dr. Rooter to come visit us on Thanksgiving. While we waited for the plumber, we drained our potatoes in the back yard and used the bathroom sink for other washing/rinsing activities and my mother wallowed in guilt.
Poor on-call plumber guy tried plunging (and failed) and headed down the basement to check the main plumbing stack. He soon informed us that our main line out of the kitchen was clogged with thick, black grease and he proceeded to clean that out. Then he came back upstairs when the sink didn’t drain only to find out we had something broken in the pipes. He cleaned out about 10lbs of potato peels and put a bucket under the sink. The broken bits couldn’t be fixed because hardware stores are closed on Thanksgiving. (of course!) We still had use of our sink and dishwasher, though! We paid the nice man and gave him a plate of Thanksgiving food for his troubles and continued with our dinner.

The turkey was delicious, as were the sweet potatoes, cranberries, bread, gravy, fruit salad, pumpkin pie and wines. The company was good and we had (I’d like to think) a good time despite all the problems with the house.

We learned a few things about our house — we need to check the circuits and perhaps upgrade the power coming into the house. We need to get our kitchen pipe stack seriously cleaned out by professionals.

At least we know what not to do on Christmas day, when we’re probably not going to have the luxury of unseasonably warm temperatures saving us from freezing to death if the power goes out.